


Are You Afraid of the Dark?

by ChloeWinchester



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Gore, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Post-The Reichenbach Fall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-01
Updated: 2015-04-01
Packaged: 2018-03-20 16:53:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3658032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChloeWinchester/pseuds/ChloeWinchester
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock fell. Jim Moriarty’s still stumbling around. Dr. Watson finds a stroke of mercy within him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Are You Afraid of the Dark?

John had to walk away from the scene he had to. God, Sherlock, Sherlock, Sherlock… All that blood, the blank, void look in his eyes it made him sick and he needed to breathe. He needed to get himself under control before he screamed.

He limped into an alleyway away from the crime scene, away from… “Jesus…” He breathed, covering his eyes and trying to force the carnage away. His lunch was stuck in his throat, heart crumbling like worn stone. He took slow breaths, squeezing his hands opened and closed.

He heard it then, ragged breath that wasn’t his own. He froze, turning to look down the alley. All he saw was a shape wearing a suit and doubled over. The back of its head was wet and it he knew. He scowled, hands clenching and immediately going for his gun.

“You. You— You bastard!”

The man stopped and raised his head into the light.

John expected…something else. Horrific grinning, licking his own blood off of his fingers, cackling that he’d won and falling down in some wet, glorious death of pure black evil.

Instead, he saw a man in a serious amount of pain, breathing quickly between quiet coos of pain, a childlike daze in his face. He cocked his head, then rocked with the throb he felt. “D-Dr. Watson?” He fell to his knees.

He could do it. he could do it right now and no one would ever care. No one would know. What was one more bullet wound in this skull?

Moriarty gagged and blood poured from his lips. He gave a ragged sound close to a sob and looked at John, and his gun. He pushed his forehead into it. “Do it,” he begged. “Do it. Kill…kill me. Please. Now.”

John stared.

Moriarty’s brandy eyes begged up at him, tears in them.

“I should,” he spat, flexing his grip on the gun. “I should. You…you just-” That dangerous smile crossed his lips.

“I know. I know. Do it. Do it, Dr. Watson. Please?” He begged. “Please. It hurts.”

Maybe letting him die here would be better. Letting him bleed to death in agony… Or putting a bullet between his eyes.

“Sherlock is, he- Because of YOU!” He pushed the gun against his skin. Moriarty whimpered.

“I did. I did, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Kill me. Kill me and make it right, Kill me…”

The way he was looking at him. Not angry, not manic, not happy he won. Just…tormented. Agonized. He looked at John like he was an angel granting him the mercy of being sent to Hell and it made his insides twist. Seeing a monster behave humanly was just… He couldn’t make sense of it.

His head…he could fix it if they hurried. He could fix that, he’d done it before. He could save him. Why should he?

He…apologized.

He put the gun away.

“Get up,” he grunted.

Moriarty looked dazed, utterly confused. “What?”

He was too raw for this, too scraped and new and easily hurt if brushed the wrong way and this bastard needed to do what he said before something bad happened.

“I said get up.” He offered him his hand.

Tacky blood on a soft palm greeted him. The Spider stood, trembling and wincing. John took a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it to the back of his head, moving Moriarty’s hand to hold it in place. “Don’t move that.”

He still looked so confused. “But, why?”

“Shut up.”

~*~

He threw up seven times on the way to the clinic, swaying  and muttering brokenly, his head throbbing and every time he was sick he looked like a child ready to call for his mum but he didn’t. He just looked straight ahead in the empty tube car gripping the sack in his hand for dear life.

John knew he was too pale. He’d lost so much blood it was sheer willpower that was keeping him upright, it had to be.

He didn’t look thrilled to be alive. In fact he looked like it was the last thing he wanted and this cruel irony of having to live with what he’d done was worse than any afterlife.

John was glad.

He killed his best friend.

And laughed about it.

Yet here he was, still helping him.

Perhaps it was a doctor thing.

He snuck him into the back of the surgery and got him into a properly equipped room he had the capacity to lock. “Sit.”

Gingerly, Moriarty got himself onto the table, tugging off his tie and letting it flutter to the ground with his coat. “Hot,” he grunted.

John touched his hand out of curiosity. He felt like ice.

He shook his head and turned away. “Lie down,” he ordered, scrubbing his hands and his wrists with hot water and soap. He didn’t have to think about this. This was simple. Muscle memory, facts, cold. He didn’t have to feel anything doing this and that’s what he planned on doing.

Then the sobs happened.

It was more horrifying than anything the man had done before. Strapping semtex to him and threatening to kill so many so quickly, that was nothing compared to the fear John felt watching Jim Moriarty cry helplessly in pain.

What scared him more was how his heart ached for him.

He put on gloves and walked over to him. “I need you to lie down,” he said softly. He was trembling all over and so pale and cold. John pressed on. “Moriarty, I need you to lie down.” Nothing still, he didn’t even register him or his harsh tone.

“Jim,” he said forcefully. Those big brown eyes met his, swollen and scared and…remorseful, and John softened. He had to. “Jim, I need you to lie down for me. Can you do that?”

He nodded and did as he was told, whimpering, head settling on a puddle of gauze. John guided him so he was on his side, making sure his body was level on the table.

He pressed an I.V. into his arm  and he shuddered. “Don’t like needles, please, no needles, please…”

“It’s just an I.V. drip, Jim,” he assured, quiet. “It won’t hurt you.” He pushed a sedative into the line and Jim trembled at the sight of it, shutting his eyes.

Why was he scared? Why was the most powerful man to walk the earth afraid of an ex-army doctor? Or a needle?

What happened to him?

He shook away the thought to keep himself from wondering.

“You’re going to go to sleep for awhile, James. And when you wake up, your head will feel better, okay?” He assured. Jim nodded very slowly and very minutely.

“If it doesn’t work, let me die, Dr. Watson. It’s okay,” he promised. “I deserve it.”

John swallowed. “Yeah, you do.”

The room was going dark and Jim shook in fear. “I’m scared of the dark,” he mumbled. John winced internally, caught between horror, marvel and concern he couldn’t explain.

“It’s alright. I’m here with you, Jim. It’s okay.” He put his hand on Jim’s bloody cheek, and to his surprise, Jim pressed into the touch with fresh tears.

His eyes closed. His breathing evened and John hooked him up to the necessary monitors and started to work.

~*~

Two weeks.

That’s how long it took for Jim to wake back up.

It’d taken eighteen hours for John to figure out how to open his phone and find some sort of an address, discovering a penthouse kept there for a Nathaniel Brook and made the arrangements to have him transferred there.

Hospital bed, heart monitor, plenty of pain medication and anything else needed was transported to Mr. Brook’s penthouse after a nasty fall off his bicycle that left him with such a grievous head injury.

John didn’t know why he was helping him. He should’ve told Greg in the dozens of times he’d seen him since Sherlock jumped that Jim Moriarty was alive, Sherlock wasn’t a fake and the papers needed to stop saying so.

But he didn’t.

He sat at the man’s bedside and used the credit card he’d found for food and tried to use the shower there once or twice but he always stumbled to work for that. He didn’t know why.

He kept thinking about those moments before Jim went under. Whimpering that he was afraid of needles and the dark.

How?

How could someone so unfeeling and fiendish be so…human? People like that couldn’t have such fears, could they?

There was nothing in the flat to indicate anything about him at all. No personal pictures, momentos, no photos on his phone, no extra business cards, nothing. No family to speak of, he supposed they might be poking around by now. And maybe it was dangerous to stay in this flat with a nearly dead man that had people that would likely kill John in an instant.

He found himself wondering in that time if Jim had a girlfriend. A wife or something, someone who cared a great deal about him that was left wondering. Or maybe the more likely and horrifically sadder truth was, Jim was alone.

John knew what alone was, and that’s what this flat felt like.

Before the hospital bed had been moved in a grand king sized thing had been pushed out of the way, its linens tight and crisp and so clean and neat. The flat itself was polished to a shine, the clothes in the closet lined up perfectly and orderly. The food in the cabinets was sparse and mainly consisted of hard candy and tea.

He’d found several bottles of hard liquor tucked in various places.

No friends, not even maniacal ones. No significant partner. No mum or dad or sister or third cousin.

No pictures, no memories.

Jim was a ghost before he’d tried to kill himself.

It sounded so horribly lonely. That same kind of hollow, crippling loneliness he’d endured himself and it was awful. Had he been less stubborn and more prone to immoral behavior for the sake of it, he and Jim might have had more in common than they already did.

And over time, John was okay with that.

He watched him sleep quite a lot and learned about his face. He could count the gray in his hair on one hand. Just a handful of silver hair working through him.

There were wrinkles around his eyes from all those dazzling smiles, faint lines around his mouth. Laugh lines. Or frown lines, he couldn’t tell. His eyebrows were so sharply sculpted, lashes long against his cheeks, lips soft pink and shapely. He looked at the contours of his throat, the top of his collarbone peeking through the hospital gown he’d been changing him in and out of.

He never looked when that happened. When he cleaned him or otherwise, it wasn’t right. He just did his job and took in nothing and dressed him again, so that remained a mystery.

By all accounts, just looking at his face and the shape of his jaw, the slight protrusion of his Adam’s apple, John couldn’t deny that he was beautiful. Maybe some shallow part of his existence was using that to aid his constantly growing intuition about the benefit of the doubt.

There was more to Jim than the surface character he’d shown him.

The faint scars on his arms told him that. He knew there were scars elsewhere too, but he never truly acknowledged what could have put them there or where they were. He was just a doctor.

And finally, at the cusp of dawn on a gray day where rain flew sideways at the windows as if it insulted its sister and thunder roared like it was throwing a tantrum, Jim opened his eyes.

At first he just looked around in sheer confusion, then his eyes rested on John and he knew figuring this out was impossible.

“Dr. Watson?” His lilt was broken from lack of vocal use, the bandages on his head moving when he spoke. John sat up and offered him some water through a straw, hopping up and excited he was awake.

“You overslept,” he teased but his expression stayed flat, checking Jim’s vitals. Jim blinked a few times, staring at him.

“I…” He broke into a smile. “Yeah, I suppose I did.”

John worked quietly. Jim watched, in awe.

“You…saved my life,” he whispered.

He got a smile.

Jim had dreamt about that smile unwillingly before.

After having him so close for so long at the pool, smelling his skin, feeling him respond to him and talking so softly to him he wondered if there might…be…

He’d woken up knowing the reason he wanted John was because Sherlock seemed so much better with him. But Sherlock didn’t treat him properly, he didn’t talk to him the way he needed to be talked to and the ridiculous lies and experiments done on this saint of a man wasn’t right.

That first day at the lab when those cornflower eyes rested on him the quietest of ‘uh ohs’ played in his head and it was trouble.

Dreams of something better, something softer and kinder that took him away from this brunt, awful feeling of his day to day life plagued him and he wanted them gone.

John would never smile at him-

But he did. He just smiled at him and it was a soft, warm one. Much different from how cold he was when he went to sleep.

“How long?” He asked.

“Two weeks,” John explained. “I’ve been using this for takeaway while I’m here, hope that’s alright.” He showed Jim the card. The Spider laughed.

“Oh yeah, it’s fine,” he mumbled. John smirked.

“Figured if you could throw away thirty million quid for a fake painting ten pounds for Chinese wasn’t much.”

Jim laughed again. It hurt his head but John smiled again and it was better.

“Wait you…you stayed? This whole time?” He asked quietly. John nodded.

“I had to keep an eye on my patient,” he explained. Jim nodded. Patient.

“Why?” He breathed, asking beyond why John stayed here with him. John shrugged.

“I dunno. Maybe it was how you apologized. Maybe it was your dashing good looks, who knows,” he chuckled.

He was smiling so easily, why? Why? He shouldn’t be smiling, not at this man… But Jim made it so…so easy. And there was no game here, there wasn’t one to play. Jim wasn’t lying with these smiles and these words, so…why not smile?

Jim cocked an achy brow at him.

“Why, Dr. Watson, are you flirting with me?”

~*~

Flirting led to talking.

Talking led to kissing.

Kissing led to understanding and passion.

Passion was broken when Jim found out Sherlock was still alive.

John was furious.

Their first time was angry and desperate and clinging. All teeth and nails and screaming each other’s name over the sirens blaring outside from the mess Jim made.

Then more talking about scars and John found out why Jim was afraid of needles and the dark, why he wanted to die.

Their second time was soft caresses and whispered praises, all open palms and tender lips.

Sherlock came back around the tenth time.

And boy, the look on those cheekbones when he heard John screaming the name of the most dangerous man in the world and the sloshing of water coming from the bathtub down the hall was just priceless.

They still laugh about it now. 


End file.
